Chapter 18
Maeve
What Breaks us Open
The drive back to Boston takes four hours and forty minutes.
Nora sleeps the whole way. Brontos under her arm.
Her cheek pressed against the side of the car seat.
The dashboard light is the only light. Lex drives with both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road, and his right hand occasionally comes off the wheel, finds my left hand on the center console, and stays there for a long minute before he needs the wheel again.
We talk in low voices.
"Tell me what he said."
"He said, ‘Bring them home.’ He said, ‘The whole family’s going to need to know.’ He said Mama needs to be told in person."
"How is he?”
"He’s hurt. He used a contraction. Nico doesn’t use contractions to me. He used one tonight."
I begin to understand the weight of this once I see Lex's face in the dashboard light, and then I understand. The Konstantinos brothers have a register. Nico breaking it means Nico bleeding.
"I'm sorry," I say.
"You didn’t do this."
"Neither did you."
"I had three days."
"You had three days in which you also kept us alive."
He doesn’t answer. His right hand finds mine on the console. He keeps it there for two minutes. Then he moves it back to the wheel because I-89 South is curving.
? ? ?
Two days pass. We are back in the brownstone — Petrov swept it twice before he let us through the door.
Nora goes back into remote schooling at the brownstone kitchen table.
She tells Brontos about the lake every morning.
The lake, in her telling, is now a place where she’s a champion rock-thrower.
The number of rocks she got into the water has been revised upward from two to twelve. I do not correct her.
Lex doesn’t correct her either when he’s at the table. He listens to her revisionist history with the face of a man who has decided that this particular court will not adjudicate accuracy.
I go back into grand jury prep at the federal building.
Two AUSAs, three FBI agents, and my testimony schedule.
The materials are familiar. The work is familiar.
I have been preparing for this testimony for six months.
The new piece is that I am being escorted into the federal building by a Konstantinos detail in a four-vehicle motorcade.
Lex is in the brownstone basement most of the day.
Cormac and Declan rotate in. Petrov runs the perimeter.
The mole lead Nico mentioned at the lake house turned out to be a dead end.
The man Petrov flagged came up clean. The mole is still loose.
Lex's face when he tells me this is a face that has tightened by half a degree.
"How close?" I say.
"Closer than I thought."
"Federal close."
He looks at me. He doesn’t lie. "Possibly."
I file this. I do not say it out loud. I am sleeping in his bed for the second consecutive night, and there is a federal mole potentially somewhere in the building where I’m supposed to testify.
? ? ?
Morning.
I check in at the federal building at 8:47 AM. The AUSA has rescheduled my morning prep session. I have an hour to kill. I walk past the criminal division to grab coffee from the third-floor break room.
Marcus Andreev is at his desk.
He looks tired. He looked tired three weeks ago when I first noticed him, and he looks more tired now. There is a coffee at his elbow that he’s stopped drinking. He’s staring at the photograph in the small silver frame on his desk. The photograph is of his daughter.
I have known Marcus Andreev since my case first brought me into this building.
He’s the federal employee who handles witness intake.
He is, by every small measure I have ever taken of him, a decent man.
He has a daughter who has been sick. He carries it the way fathers carry sick daughters — in his face, when he forgets to manage it.
I stop at his desk.
"Marcus."
He looks up. The look takes a half-second to focus, the way the look of a tired man takes a half-second to focus.
"Ms. Callahan."
"How is she?"
He pauses. He looks at the photograph again. When he answers, the voice is the voice of a man trying very hard to mean what he’s saying.
"She started a new round of treatment last week. The doctors are hopeful."
My chest does what it does when another parent tells me about their sick child. It tightens in the exact place where my own daughter sleeps at night, and my hands, of their own accord, come together at my waist.
"I am so sorry, Marcus. What is her name?”
"Anya."
"I will be thinking about her."
He looks up at me with the look of a man who has been told a small kindness by another parent in a hallway. The look of a man who is being held together by very little.
"Thank you, Mrs. Callahan. That means more than you know."
I nod. I move on. I get the coffee. I file Marcus Andreev under the column in my brain that is ‘the people in this building I might trust.’ He’s been in that column since my first week in this building. He’s in it more firmly today.
? ? ?
Afternoon.
Lex drives Nora and me to Eleni Konstantinos's apartment.
The apartment is on the third floor of a building on Beacon Street that has been quietly Konstantinos-owned since 1987. The hallway smells like cardamom, lemon, and candle wax.
Eleni opens the door before Lex knocks. She’s been waiting at the door.
She’s in a navy dress and small gold earrings, and her hair is in a precise gray bun.
Her face, when she opens the door, is the face of a Greek mother who has been told what every Greek mother lives in hope of being told and is now, this afternoon, going to meet the proof of it.
She doesn’t speak immediately.
She looks at Lex. Her eyes go wet. She doesn’t let the tears spill. She nods at him once.
Then she drops to her knees in the foyer to be at Nora's eye level.
Nora considers her gravely. Brontos is under one arm.
Nora's free hand is in mine. She’s in the red wool coat I bought her in October, and her hair is in two small, uneven braids that Lex did this morning at the kitchen table while I was on a call.
She is, I realize as Eleni studies her, the smallest possible human in the foyer of this apartment.
Eleni says, "Hello, ‘koukla mou.’"
Nora says, "That is not English."
"It is Greek. It means ‘doll.’ It is what we call a small girl who is loved."
Nora considers this. She looks at Lex. She looks back at Eleni. She says, "Are you Daddy's mama?”
Eleni's face does what Lex's face has been doing for two weeks; the architecture under the skin is rearranging in real time.
Eleni doesn’t let it crack. She’s sixty-eight years old and has buried a husband and a child, and she’s the discipline of a woman who has decided what she will and will not do in front of a granddaughter she’s meeting for the first time.
"Yes," she says. "I am. I am your ‘yia-yia.’"
"‘Yia-yia’," Nora repeats. The Greek lands on her tongue with the small, careful seriousness she brings to all new words. "‘Yia-yia.’"
"That is exactly right."
Nora hands Eleni Brontos.
"You can hold him," she says.
Eleni takes the elephant in both hands. She holds him like a woman holds a christening gown. Her hands are steady. Her face is doing what it is doing.
"He’s a fine elephant," she tells Nora.
"He’s missing one eye. And his trunk is mostly stuffing."
"Then he’s lived an interesting life."
"Yes."
Eleni stands. Slowly. She hands Brontos back to Nora. She turns to me.
"Maeve."
"Eleni."
She takes both of my hands. Her hands are warm. They are smaller than mine. She holds my hands and looks at my face for a long second, the way a Greek matriarch looks at a woman who has produced a granddaughter without her knowledge: with both gratitude and a small held grievance.
"Thank you," she says.
"I am sorry it took so long."
"It took as long as it took. We have time now."
She lets go of my hands. She doesn’t embrace me. The embrace will come. We are not there yet. We are at the version of this where two grown women acknowledge each other in a foyer, and that version is enough for me today.
She turns back to Nora. She drops to her knees again.
"Will you show me how Brontos says hello?” she says.
Nora considers Brontos. Brontos, in Nora's hands, executes a small, dignified bow. Eleni laughs. The laugh is the laugh of a woman who has just been bowed to by a stuffed elephant in her granddaughter’s hands, and the laugh undoes me in a way I had not prepared myself for.
I look at Lex. He’s in the doorway with his hands at his sides. His face is doing what it does. We do not look at each other for long because if we do, I am going to come apart on Eleni Konstantinos's foyer rug.
? ? ?
We stay for forty minutes.
Eleni feeds Nora ‘galaktoboureko’ and shows her the icons in the small alcove off the living room and tells her, in Greek that I do not understand, and that Nora absorbs anyway because Nora, at almost three, is in the absorbent phase of language acquisition, the names of three saints.
Nora pronounces ‘Aikaterini’ with the gravity of a woman taking a vow.
At 3:40 PM I have to leave.
I have grand jury prep at 4:00 PM at the federal building. I cannot be late. The AUSA has cleared a ninety-minute window in his calendar.
Eleni says, "Leave Nora. Go. Petrov is downstairs. The federal detail will rotate at 4:30. I will hold her until you are back."
I look at Nora. Nora is on the carpet showing Brontos to a small icon of Saint Catherine. She’s content.
I kneel down. "Baby. I have to go to work for a little while."
"Okay."
"You will stay here with ‘yia-yia.’"
"Okay."
"I will be back before dinner."
"Okay."
She doesn’t look up from Saint Catherine. She’s fine in the way Nora is fine when she’s fine, meaning she’s decided that ‘yia-yia’ is a known quantity and ‘yia-yia's carpet is acceptable, and Saint Catherine is interesting.
I kiss the top of her head.